Supporting Ontology Alignment Tasks with Edge Bundling
Muhammad Hassan Nasir, Orland Hoeber, Jöerg Evermann · 2013
Ontologies are commonly used for knowledge representation and to exchange information between multiple applications. When the same information is represented by different overlapping ontologies, information sharing requires a mapping between corresponding pairs of entities. While ontology alignment algorithms have been developed to support such tasks, they generally do not offer entirely complete and precise mappings. As a result, an important interactive aspect of the ontology alignment process is the validation of automatically generated mappings, as well as the addition of new mappings, by a knowledge manager. While visual ontology alignment interfaces exist to support these tasks, showing a large number of mappings can result in a significant amount of visual clutter. To address this issue, an edge bundling approach has been adapted to the constraints of an existing ontology alignment interface. A user study was designed and conducted to evaluate the value of edge bundling in this context, with positive results for both mapping validation and addition tasks.